CRM for Outlook vs support for Mobile / Web devices FAQ

Update: As of 23rd of July 2020 below is still relevant and no news in any way has come from Microsoft. We do not expect this to change so there are therefore no plans to support CRMFO on Mobile and Web.

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Hi all

As of this writing (16th of February 2017) you might have heard in the news that Outlook for iPhone and Android now supports extensions. This article explains what that means for CRM for Outlook and if it's supported?

The plan is that at some point, we want to support. In fact, we have been waiting for the iPhone extension support since Microsoft said "coming soon" back in early 2015... that was 2 years ago!... but now it is finally here as you have read... sort of. 

For now, there are two limitations to their (MS) announcement that prevent CRMFO from being there: 

1. It only works on Office 365
2. Microsoft so far decide who is allowed to make extensions meaning that only 6 extensions selected by Microsoft currently works

Regarding 1, that is no issue for O365 users but MS has not yet said if they will bring it to on-premise Outlook installs... My guess is it will happen but given the fact that "soon" last time meant 2 years I do not dare guess when.

Regarding 2, that is also an unknown time factor. I'm pretty sure though that given we are competitors of MS and their CRM offerings and our company size they will not contact us and allow us to be there early... so we need to wait until they allow everyone to submit extensions and again no timeline from MS when that happens :-( and even when it happens it sounds like there will be an approval process (hope MS is fairer in such compared to that of Apple that can reject you if it competes with something they make)

All this as you can read lead to a very unknown timeline... they could allow everyone/everywhere tomorrow, or 2 years from... it is so unknown in fact that we have set the CRMFO Mobile part on hold in terms of development until the future is less unknown. The reason I mention that is even when everything is available and clear our part (the development and design) need to happen as extensions on mobile are not something that just runs the already developed code... it is done in a different coding language.